said
this five years ago, and all of you say it now, that is a matter that you
Kentuckians ought to note. That is a vast change in the Northern public
sentiment upon that question.

Of what tendency is that change? The tendency of that change is to bring
the public mind to the conclusion that when men are spoken of, the
negro is not meant; that when negroes are spoken of, brutes alone are
contemplated. That change in public sentiment has already degraded
the black man in the estimation of Douglas and his followers from the
condition of a man of some sort, and assigned him to the condition of a
brute. Now, you Kentuckians ought to give Douglas credit for this. That is
the largest possible stride that can be made in regard to the perpetuation
of your thing of slavery.

A voice: Speak to Ohio men, and not to Kentuckians!

Mr. LINCOLN: I beg permission to speak as I please.

In Kentucky perhaps, in many of the slave States certainly, you are trying
to establish the rightfulness of slavery by reference to the Bible. You
are trying to show that slavery existed in the Bible times by divine
ordinance. Now, Douglas is wiser than you, for your own benefit, upon that
subject. Douglas knows that whenever you establish that slavery was--right
by the Bible, it will occur that that slavery was the slavery of the white
man, of men without reference to color; and he knows very well that you
may entertain that idea in Kentucky as much as you please, but you will
never win any Northern support upon it. He makes a wiser argument for you:
he makes the argument that the slavery of the black man; the slavery of
the man who has a skin of a different color from your own, is right. He
thereby brings to your support Northern voters who could not for a moment
be brought by your own argument of the Bible right of slavery. Will you
give him credit for that? Will you not say that in this matter he is more
wisely for you than you are for yourselves?

Now, having established with his entire party this doctrine, having been
entirely successful in that branch of his efforts in your behalf, he is
ready for another.

At this same meeting at Memphis he declared that in all contests between
the negro and the white man he was for the white man, but that in all
questions between the negro and the crocodile he was for the negro. He did
not make that declaration accidentally at Memphis. He made it a great many
times in the canvass in Illinois last year (t